InTrade-TradeSports CEO John Delaney (a.k.a. “The Sponge”) has siphoned the best concepts premiered by HubDub, and, in particular, has copied WORD FOR WORD some of the HubDub webpages.
Example: The 3 selling points of the InTrade .NET login/registration webpage are similar to those of HubDub.
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HubDub:
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InTrade. NET:
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John Delaney = The Sponge
Nigel Eccles = The Leader
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The real question is whether any amount of technological wizardry can make up for such poor value propositions.
I don’t respond directly to your comment, but here’s a couple of thoughts.
HubDub is receiving a big amount of Google-referred visits, That’s more than just “technological wizardry”. It’s real web traffic.
Same thing with the friending system, where traders can alert their “friends”. It drives traffic to some particular prediction markets created by people who have a long list of “friends”. (I have more than 200 “friends” at HubDub, and I know some have more.)
That said, once you are familiar with HubDub, in some ways, you feel that NewsFutures is the perfect prediction exchange for the sophisticated traders. I like the high level of sophistication in NewsFutures.
http://us.newsfutures.com/